Montana’s Native Americans were also swept up into the war. This is Crow Chief Plenty Coups at the grave of an unknown soldier. Plenty Coups encouraged men to fight, though they weren't considered American citizens. MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

This photo taken circa 1917-1918 shows a World War I battlefield near Verdun, France, with holes made by bombs filled with water. When ambulance driver Stull Holt arrived at Verdun in the fall of 1917, he discovered a scene of utter desolation. "We were in historic ground and it looked it," the New York City native wrote home to family. AP

The day before the end of the war that was to end all wars, Emmett Ryan, a Valier High School and Montana State University at Missoula graduate in mechanical engineering, was fatally wounded at Argonne. Wounded Nov. 10, he died Nov. 12, the day after armistice. He’s the namesake of American Legion Post 36 in Valier. MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Maj. Gen. John Pershing insisted on American forces preserving their own identity.
Unprepared for the final plunge into World War I, the United States rallied with almost hysterical unity after the declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917. Major General John J. Pershing was named by President Wilson to command the American Expeditionary Force. He wasted no time getting to France to make plans. Pershing in seen after his arrival in France. AP

G.R. "Jack" Milburn, a pilot of the U.S. Army Air Service, 12th Aero Squadron, during World War I. He stands beside his airplane, a French Salmson observation plane, in Koblenz, Germany. Courtesy Mike Milburn

Baron Manfred von Richthofen, leader of Germany's Flying Circus and airplane ace known as the "Red Baron" during World War I, is shown in this undated photo. The ace flyer, whose planes were painted red, was nicknamed the "Red Baron" by the British. History books say that The Red Baron, the legendary World War I German flying ace, was shot out of the sky and died in April 1918. But new research suggests that his death spiral may have begun nine months earlier.A University of Missouri at Columbia researcher and his Ohio collaborator argue a severe injury to Manfred von Richthofen's brain during an earlier aerial confrontation figured in his death. The Great Falls Tribune Copyright 2002;No

A World War I statue in Fort Benton lists 71 men who died in World War I and reads “That we, and our posterity, might peacefully live, these valiant sons of Chouteau County gave their lives in the World War 1917-1918, and we hold them in our grateful hearts with reverence and honor forever.” TRIBUNE PHOTO/KRISTEN INBODY

In this April 34, 1928 photo, former World War I German ace Ernst Udet gets ready to leave his plane after a practice flight near Munich, Germany. Barely a decade after the Wright brothers skimmed over the grass at Kitty Hawk, the airplane had been perverted from a marvel of human ingenuity into an instrument of terror. AP

Drew Briner, grandson of Hermann Bausch, pictured in background, who was one of the 78 men and women convicted of sedition in World War I reads from Bauschs' journals, during a pardons ceremony in Helena, Mt., on Wednesday May 3, 2006. At the end of the ceremony Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer signed individual pardons for the family members who were present. AP Photo/Independent Record, George Lane

In 1998, Roy Scow, a 102-year-old WWI veteran, from Helena, Mont., was awarded the French National Order of the Legion of Honor (Chevalier) Award by Susan Talbot, honorary French ambassador to Montana, in Helena. The French government is awarding the medal to all U.S. servicemen who fought on French soil during WWI. Scow was the first of four Montana veterans to receive the award. George Lane, The Great Falls Tribune Copyright 1998;No

Last World War I American veteran. In a May 26, 2008 file photo Frank Buckles receives an American flag during Memorial Day activities at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Mo. Buckles died Feb. 27, 2011 at his home in Charles Town, W.Va. Charlie Riedel, ASSOCIATED PRESS

They died of artillery fire and the Spanish flu. They died in plane crashes and sunken battleships and blood- and mud-filled trenches, in tangles of barbed wire and rains of machine gun fire.

One hundred years ago, April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.

Then came the drafts and the victory gardens, volunteering with the Red Cross and star-spangled send-offs at train depots across Montana. And hard questions.

The questions Americans faced then are questions we still face, said historian Martha Kohl, who worked on the Montana Historical Society’s new “Montana and the Great War” website at mhs.mt.gov/education/wwi.

“They were asking themselves what does it mean to be a patriot? To be a good American? What do we do when people aren’t being patriotic how we think they should be?” she said.

“World War I was the very first global war,” Kohl said. “There was no escaping the war. You think about the number of men who served from Montana — 17 percent of those eligible. That’s your brother, your son, your father, your neighbor.”

The war was a hard sell to the traditionally isolationist country. Then came stories of the German submarines sinking British and American ships, among them the Lusitania, of the rape of Belgium and of the Zimmermann Telegram, which proposed a military alliance between Germany, Mexico and Japan against the United States, if the U.S. entered the war.

“The propaganda effort was all out,” Kohl said. “In Washington, D.C., they later realized it was too much. It got out of control. You’re bombarded with posters, with newspaper articles, about how you should feel, about your duty.”

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A bronze plaque depicting World War I is part of the Montana Veterans Memorial in Great Falls.(Photo: TRIBUNE FILE PHOTO)

A fever of patriotism swept the country. Stories emerged of tremendous sacrifices at home and especially among those who served in the trenches. Women stepped in to fill labor shortages on farms and factories, and they filled vital roles as nurses and in communications. Native Americans, not yet granted citizenship, served in far-off battlefields.

Inspired by a similar effort in Cascade County, Chinook folks organized the Blaine County Soldiers’ Home Protective Association to “look after the home business interests and family affairs of the men who have gone to fight our battle,” with the hope it would “doubtless result in better spirit, home and confidence among the boys.”

And yet the war years saw mob violence and the repressions of rights.

“There’s no one story,” Kohl said. “It was a crazy quilt of experiences.”

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Hingham was only four years old when World War I erupted in Europe. In this early photo, the town gathers at the train depot to bid farewell to departing soldiers.(Photo: TRIBUNE ARCHIVES)

On July 29, 1918, a troop train carrying 208 draftees left Plentywood with fanfare and waving relatives from every corner of the county. One farmer, with wheat ripening in his fields, stood smiling next to his two sons as they boarded a troop train, the Tribune reported.

About 19 percent of eligible Sheridan County men served, 1,517 men.

“With a big grain crop about to be harvested this drain of manpower from the county is having its effect, but it goes without saying that the patriotic farmers are not dismayed, but to the contrary are adjusting themselves to conditions,” the Tribune recounted. “Every acre of grain will be garnered in a determination on the part of those left at home to do their share and to feed the men called to arms.

“No other agricultural section of the state has contributed a greater share toward the support of the war than Sheridan County. Manpower, agricultural products, Red Cross efforts, war savings and Liberty loan funds in every instance have been contributed in excess of each quota called,” the story continued.

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The Cascade County Colored Contingent before their departure in 1917 to fight in World War I.(Photo: TRIBUNE FILE PHOTO)

Nearby Phillips County actually sent the highest percentage of its men to war (27 percent), with Sweet Grass County (25 percent) and Carter County (26 percent) the next highest, according to the MHS’s war site.

“The spirit of enthusiasm which prevailed among the men as they departed exemplifies the fact that the conflict in Europe has reached a stage where the men of this county are only pleased to have the opportunity of answering the call to colors in defense of world wide democracy,” the Plentywood article concluded.

When the declaration of war came, 12,500 Montanans enlisted. Another 28,000 were drafted.

All told, 40,500 Montanans served in World War I — 17 percent of the men (ages 18-44) eligible for the draft. That was one of the highest rates of any state, partly a result of a population overestimation.

From Cascade County, 2,151 men served, which was 16 percent of those eligible. Silver Bow County had the lowest rate, 11 percent, but mining was vital for the war effort.

A September 1917 story described one epic send-off in Fort Benton after the first draft.

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A World War I statue in Fort Benton lists 71 men who died in World War I and reads “That we, and our posterity, might peacefully live, these valiant sons of Chouteau County gave their lives in the World War 1917-1918, and we hold them in our grateful hearts with reverence and honor forever.” Chouteau County then stretched to Conrad, and included towns mentioned on the memorial but largely lost to history, such as Ashmoor, Warrick, Clear Lake and Genou.(Photo: TRIBUNE PHOTO/KRISTEN INBODY)

“They do things on a grand scale down in that old town,” the Tribune’s source, Cherry Brown, said.

“Patriotism overflowed, and the occasion was one of those never-to-be-forgotten events that make a fellow a better citizen just to have been present. There was a brass band out playing patriotic airs, a male quartet singing patriotic songs and then there was a parade in which everybody in the dear old town got out and took part and down at the depot shook hands with the boys, wishing them good luck and a safe return,” Brown recounted. “I’ll tell you it took a hero to keep the tears back, and while I fully expect to hear of our Montana boys doing many valorous things at the front in battle, measuring them on the ground that only a hero could keep the tears back that evening, I fear there were not many heroes among us.”

Soon after, Glasgow sent off 28 soldier boys with a program arranged by the chamber of commerce and attended by “practically every citizen in town.” After a chorus of the “Star Spangled Banner,” the local Army recruiter spoke. Each enlistee was presented at the depot with an elaborate box lunch, homemade candy, cigars and tobacco, the lunch from the local Red Cross and the tobacco by local businessmen.

Some thought twice when the crowd at the depot was long dispersed.

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Hingham was only four years old when World War I erupted in Europe. In this early photo, the town gathers at the train depot to bid farewell to departing soldiers.(Photo: TRIBUNE ARCHIVES)

In May 1918, the Tribune published a list of deserters, among them draftees from Butte, Malta (three men), Livingston, Zurich and noted the government’s $50 reward for their apprehension. Others married to avoid the draft all together. One Roundup groom said he decided to wed and “do his fighting at home.”

In describing its vision of why the United States had joined the fray, Women’s Walsh Club of Cascade County, rallying to re-elect Thomas J. Walsh to the U.S. Senate wrote about the “Hun horror” and said “the women of America, as well as the men, stand united for wiping out aristocracy and establishing permanent peace.”

One of the most poignant newspaper stories of the era read: “Somewhere in Europe, when the great American army now being assembled, goes into action and Michael Mayor of Tobison, Mont., stands on the end of an enemy trench with his bayonet pointed downward, he is going to look into the face of his father, for from the fields of Hungary another Michael Mayer, his parent, has been called into the service of his country.”

In this undated photo, shell holes have been transformed into shelters for infantrymen in the bitter and bloody fighting of World War I near Verdun in France.(Photo: AP)

Two-thirds of Montanans were immigrants or the children of immigrants, with rates especially high in Deer Lodge and Silver Bow counties. In Cascade County, 33 percent of residents were foreign born and as many were the children of immigrants.

Irish Montanans objected to fighting alongside the British. Germans and Eastern Europeans didn’t want to fight against their homelands — though many did.

Fired by propaganda, some Montanans turned on their neighbors, particularly immigrants.

Montana enacted the harshest anti-free speech law of any state in the country’s history. Grumbling against the war, or soldiers on the town, or food policies or any number of other “unpatriotic” things could land one in the dungeon-like state prison in Deer Lodge.

Drew Briner, grandson of Hermann Bausch, pictured in background, who was one of the 78 men and women convicted of sedition in World War I reads from Bauschs' journals, during a pardons ceremony in Helena, Mt., on May 3, 2006. At the end of the ceremony Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer signed individual pardons for the family members who were present.(Photo: AP Photo/Independent Record, George Lane)

From 1918-1919, 76 men and three women were convicted of sedition in Montana, with 40 men and one women sent to prison. Gov. Brian Schweitzer pardoned them in 2006.

“Across this country, it was a time in which we had lost our minds,” Schweitzer said at the time. “So today in Montana, we will attempt to make it right. In Montana, we will say to an entire generation of people, we are sorry. And we challenge the rest of the country to do the same.”

In Lewistown, a mob pursued “pro-German” men demanding they kiss an American flag, with one man who refused to buy war bonds threatened with lynching, and they burned the high school’s German textbooks. Some 2,000 people joined a parade that punctuated the day.

A Lewistown mob burns the high school’s German textbooks in 1918.(Photo: COURTESY PHOTO/LEWISTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY)

Melstone, too, saw the burning of German books, but World War I mob violence took an even uglier turn in Dawson County at the Mennonite community in Bloomfield.

Mennonites, like Hutterites, are Anabaptists of German heritage who are committed to pacifism. John Franz was a local leader and farmer who interceded with the local and state draft board, arranging furloughs and deferments for Mennonites, often on the grounds they had families and were needed for farming.

Franz was at a school meeting when a man asked him to step outside, where he was accosted by several men who forced him into a car and noted that he had a German (language) newspaper, which actually came from his Minnesota hometown not Germany. Armed and in possession of a noose, the men said they were going to “fix him.”

His wife, seven months pregnant, jumped on the running board as the car pulled out with him inside, but another man threw her to the ground, their son wrote in the October 1952 issue of “Mennonite Life.”

John Franz and his wife, years after he was kidnapped and hauled to Glendive for trial as a suspected seditionist.(Photo: MHS)

Among the dozen men kidnapping Franz was the county sheriff, two attorneys, a banker, businessmen and ranchers. They drove him into the badlands and he later learned they intended to hang him over the Yellowstone River, though they waffled as he pleaded for a hearing. He was taken to jail, and then at a “gorilla hearing” 200 people fired questions at him about his loyalties.

“The main changes centered about the idea they thought he was ‘pro German,’” his son wrote. Franz explained to the crowd that Mennonites didn’t buy war bonds but contributed to the Red Cross, more than twice as much as any other community of a similar size. Liberty Bonds raised $17 billion for the war, and pressure to buy was intense.

The Franzes later learned unscrupulous neighbors whose lands bordered the Mennonites’ holdings floated the rumors that nearly led to his death.

Many Hutterites fled the United States to Canada during the war. An estimated 56 were drafted, then harassed when they refused to wear uniforms or contribute to the war effort, according to research in the North Dakota State University Library’s Germans from Russian Heritage Collection. Four were imprisoned and tortured in Alcatraz and Fort Leavenworth, and two died.

Some Americans felt duped after the war as the haze of propaganda and patriotism cleared, Kohl said.

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A World War I memorial at the Missoula County Courthouse was erected by American Legion Auxiliary members.(Photo: TRIBUNE PHOTO/KRISTEN INBODY)

“There was this sense that war profiteers took advantage of people’s emotions. There were investigations in Congress into how much money some people made,” she said. “It’s not hard to draw parallels.”

The war years were hard years, and the years that followed saw yet more suffering and struggle.

Five-thousand Montanans died of the Spanish flu pandemic — Butte alone lost 1,200 people to the influenza in less than a year — and drought came, commodity prices crashed, half the state’s banks went bust and towns disappeared. Half of Montana farmers lost their land in the 1920s.

Montana lost 939 servicemen in action, again one of the highest percentages in the country. Thousands of men came home shell-shocked, with what would later be diagnosed as PTSD, which combined with a lack of job opportunities for a desperate situation.

Photographer Joseph Dixon recounted veterans “dying by the roadside,” “helpless and suffering” on the Blackfeet Reservation.

During the war, the pressure not to strike was high, but meanwhile mining corporate profits soared, while workers were expected to work harder in more dangerous mines for wages that didn’t keep pace with inflation or corporate gains. Unions in Butte clashed with the Anaconda Co., with 16 miners shot in the back during a 1920 strike. The socialism spirit came to farmers in Plentywood, too, making it Montana’s “red corner.”

All that and Prohibition, too.

Yet despite the hardships that followed the war, Montanans tried to honor the sacrifice of those who served. They erected monuments and founded American Legion posts. They established rituals of remembrance, such as Nov. 11 commemorations, that continue today — all these years after the end of the war that was to end all wars.

People you should know:

Captain Horace Bivins left retirement to serve his country, figuring his expertise could be helpful.(Photo: MHS PHOTO)

•Captain Horace Bivins: A “Buffalo Soldier” who fought with Theodore Roosevelt on San Juan Hill, Bivins sold his land at a $5,000 loss with a crop unharvested to rejoin the military, serving as a supply, detention and reserve commander. He said, “Every man who can be of service … should consider his country first and himself second.”

•Navy Pharmacist’s Mate Vincent Albert Nolan: Tens of thousands died trying to gain ground at Blanc Mont in the Champagne region, a place the Doughboy Center called “the greatest killing ground of the French Army.” Into this bloodbath came Nolan, who served as a corpsman. During the 1918 battle that expelled the Germans from the region, he braved machine gun and shell fire to assist wounded and exposed comrades, earning a French Croix de Guerre and the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross “for extraordinary heroism in action.” He also treated Marines at Belleau Wood, where Marine Corps legends were made (That’s the land of the Devil Dogs and “Retreat? Hell, we just got here!”).

•Rep. Jeanette Rankin: National women’s suffrage was three years away when the first woman was sworn in as a member of Congress, on April 2, 1917 after Congress debated for a month whether a woman could be a member. She was just in time to vote against the war. The April 6 Tribune described the situation this way:

“Miss Rankin of Montana, the only woman member of congress, sat through the first roll call with bowed head, failing to answer to her name, twice called by the clerk. On the second roll call she arose and said in a sobbing voice, ‘I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.’

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Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress and a human rights activist. She refused to vote for the United States to enter World War I or World War II despite popular opinion.(Photo: TRIBUNE FILE PHOTO)

“For a moment, then she remained standing, support herself against a desk and as cries of ‘vote, vote’ came from several parts of the house, she sank back into her seat without voting audibly. She was recorded in the negative.”

Rankin’s vote became legendary when she was the only member of congress to vote against declaring war after the attack on Pearl Harbor 24 years later. In 1917, she was one of 50 to vote no. Both votes had huge political cost for her.

•Surgical nurse Violet Hodgson: She was among the first women in Montana to answer the call to war and served near the front during the Meuse-Argonne offensive, which cost the lives of 26,277 American soldiers. More Americans died at the Meuse-Argonne than in any other battle in American history, among them 3,916 men of the Wild West Division, in which Montanans served.

•Sgt. Henry Nicholas Gunther: This Baltimore man was the last American to die in World War I, shot at 10:59 a.m., one minute before the Nov. 11, 1918, end of the war. Both sides knew the war was nearly at its end, but they kept firing right up to the minute, emptying artillery caches at each other up to the last night.

Emmett Ryan(Photo: MHS PHOTO)

•Sgt. Emmett Ryan: The day before the end of the war that was to end all wars, this Valier High School and Montana State University at Missoula graduate in mechanical engineering was fatally wounded at Argonne. Wounded Nov. 10, he died Nov. 12, the day after armistice. He’s the namesake of American Legion Post 36 in Valier.

•Hermann Bausch: A German immigrant and Billings farmer, Bauch was arrested and convicted of sedition for saying when he refused to buy Liberty Bonds, used to fund the war, that he did “care anything for the Red, White and Blue” and “would rather see Germany win than France (or) England.” He served 28 months in the Montana State Prison, during which time his toddler son died. He was one of 78 men and women convicted of sedition in World War I and later wrote that he regretted the loss of time and of his beautiful child but “I do not regret that I refused to voluntarily aid in the starvation of children and the rape of nations. I have lost much, but I still have my self-respect.” He hoped for world peace and a greater love among men.

Senator Burton Wheeler sitting at the controls of the senate subway car, cigar in hand. He refused to take part in World War I’s “sedition witch hunt.”(Photo: Arthur Scott/George Mason University Archives)

•Sen. Burton K. Wheeler: As federal district attorney in Butte, Wheeler refused to indict anyone for sedition during World War I despite enormous pressure. He took his iron spine to Washington, D.C., fighting corruption, the KKK and preserving the independence of the Supreme Court against the actions of his own party’s president, Franklin Roosevelt.

•Frank Buckles: The last American World War I veteran, this West Virginian died at age 110. He enlisted at age 17 and drove ambulances and motorcycles near the front during World War I. During World War II, Buckles was a civilian prisoner of the Japanese in the Philippines. He farmed until age 105.

•William J. Lake: Likely the longest-lived Montana veteran of World War I, Lake died at 108. Interviewed by Richard Rubin, author of “Last of the Doughboys,” Lake said he went to work at eight years old driving and shoeing horses. He was drafted and inducted in Livingston to become part of the 91st “Wild West” Division, made up of Westerners and symbolized by a pine tree, and of the 362nd Infantry Regiment, Montana machine gunners. After a bout of measles sidelined him in England, Lake arrived on the Front just in time for the 362nd’s assault on Gesnes, which cost the Division 150 officers and 4,000 men. He drove a mule from the ammunition depot to the machine guns over and over while targeted by Germans. He was hit in the heel of his shoe and poisoned by mustard gas. The man next to him was shot by a sniper, but, he marveled 85 years later in a Yakima, Wash. nursing home, “that sniper picked him instead of me.”

In a May 26, 2008 file photo Frank Buckles receives an American flag during Memorial Day activities at the National World War I Museum in Kansas City, Mo. Buckles died early Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011 of natural causes in his home in Charles Town, W.Va.(Photo: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

•Al Schak: A Missoula author called “The Big Red One,” he was a reported missing and presumed dead three times during the war, returning to Montana brokenhearted to write “Soul Wounds: A Novel of the World War.”

•Doughboys: Fort Benton had the first World War I monument in Montana, dedicated Nov. 11, 1923. Once prominently in the middle of Front Street at the intersection nearest the Grand Hotel, the $4,000 Soldiers Memorial Monument, which lists 71 who died in the war, was moved to Legion Park near the fort. A 1923 fundraising letter for the monument noted the hard times that had come to the county but “the little child or the aged man who gives his copper penny offers his heart on the altar of patriotic devotion” and described the monument was “little enough for the only compensation we can make.” Kalispell had a similar statue on Main Street in front of the courthouse, but it was moved in 1972 to the Montana Veterans Home in Columbia Falls. Hamilton’s statue is in front of its historic courthouse, now a museum. Missoula’s Doughboy statue is in front of the courthouse. “Doughboys” was the slang term for members of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.

– Sources: Montana Historical Society’s Montana and the Great War Website, River Press, “Last of the Doughboys” by Richard Rubin, Great Falls Tribune archives.